The Love Affairs of Great Musicians Volume I Part 1

The Love Affairs of Great Musicians.

Volume 1.

by Rupert Hughes.

NOTE

Portions of a few of the chapters of this work appeared serially in _The Criterion_, and the last chapter was published in _The Smart Set_.

While, so far as the author knows, this is the first book on the subject, it is given, perhaps, especial novelty by the fact that advantage could be taken of much new material given to the public for the first time (with one exception) in the last few months, notably: a revelation of the exact ident.i.ty of Beethoven's "Immortal Beloved;" the letters of Liszt to his princess; letters of Chopin long supposed to have been burned, as well as diaries and letters gathered by an intimate friend for a biography whose completion was prevented by death; the publication of a vast amount of Wagneriana; the appearance of a full life of Tschaikovski by his brother, with complete elucidation of much that had been suppressed; the first volume of a new biography of Clara Schumann, with a detailed account of the whole progress of her beautiful love story, down to the day of the marriage; and numberless fugitive paragraphs throwing new light on affairs more or less unknown or misunderstood.

Love it is an hatefulle pees, A free acquitaunce without re lees.

An hevy burthen light to here, A wikked wawe awey to were.

It is kunnyng withoute science, Wisdome withoute sapience, Bitter swetnesse and swete errour, Right eville savoured good savour; A strengthe weyked to stonde upright, And feblenesse fulle of myght.

A laughter it is, weping ay; Reste that traveyleth nyght and day.

Also a swete h.e.l.le it is, And a soroufulle Paradys.

Romaunt of the Rose.

VOLUME I.

CHAPTER I.

THE OVERTURE

Musicians as lovers! The very phrase evokes and parades a pageant of amours! The thousand heartaches; the fingers clutching hungrily at keys that might be other fingers; the fiddler with his eyelids clenched while he dreams that the violin, against his cheek is the satin cheek of "the inexpressive She;" the singer with a cry in every note; the moonlit youth with the mandolin tinkling his serenade to an ivied window; the dead-marches; the nocturnes; the amorous waltzes; the duets; the trills and trinkets of flirtatious scherzi; the laughing roulades; the discords melted into concord as solitude into the arms of reunion--these are music's very own.

So capable of love and its expression is music, indeed, that you almost wonder if any but musicians have ever truly loved, or loving have expressed. And yet--! Round every corner there lurks an "and yet." And if you only continue your march, or your reading, you always reach that corner.

Your first thought would be, that a good musician must be a good lover; that a broken heart alone can add the Master's degree to the usual conservatory diploma of Bachelor of Music; that all musicians must be sentimental, if musicians at all; and finally that only musicians can know how to announce and embellish that primeval theme to which all existence is but variations, more or less brilliant, more or less in tune.

But go a little further, and closer study will prove that some of the world's greatest virtuosos in love could neither make nor carry a tune; and that, by corollary, some of the greatest tunesters in the world were tyros, ignoramuses, or heretics in that old lovers' arithmetic which begins: 1 plus 1 equals 1.

If you care to watch the cohort of musicians, good, bad, and worse, that I shall have to deploy before you, you shall see almost every sort and condition of love and lover that humanity can include. And incidentally--to tuck in here a preface that would otherwise be skipped--let me explain that in the following affairs I have preferred to give you the people as accurately as I can make them out.

In place of the easy trick of stringing together a number of gorgeous fairy stories founded on fact, I have preferred the long labour of hunting down the truth and telling only what I have found and believe to be true. Fact and not fancy; presentation and not fiction; have been the aim throughout. Where the facts are spa.r.s.e, I have not hesitated to say so; have not stooped to pad out gaps, with graceful and romantic imaginings; and have indeed never hazarded a guess or an inference without frankly branding it as such.

Furthermore, as far as s.p.a.ce permits and doc.u.ments exist, the musicians tell their own stories in their own words.

For the making of this little book, I have not been able to include all the men who ever wrote one note after or above another; nor to read all the books ever published in all the world's languages: and yet, that I have been decently thorough will appear, I think, in the list of books at the back. This does not claim to be a complete bibliography of the subject, but, omitting hundreds of books I have ransacked in vain, it catalogues only such works as I have consulted with profit, and the reader could consult with pleasure.

It may be well to say that, with the exception of the occasional necessity or seeming-necessity for taking one side or the other in a matter of dispute, I have avoided the facility of bandying highly moral verdicts and labelling these victors or victims of life with tags marking their destinations in the next world. He who gets into another's heart with understanding, will find it impossible to indulge in wholesale blame--"_tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner_." So, without pretending to have comprehended any of these human hearts altogether, I have learned enough to lean almost always a little toward the defence, and still more nearly always toward the praise of the woman in the case.

And yet, the whole effort and viewpoint of the work will be found, I think, to be based upon a deep belief that one love is better than two, and that earnestness and honesty and altruism are more blessed and blissful, even with poverty and suffering, than any wealth of money, or of fame, or of amorous experience.

As a last chapter to this series of "true stories," I have ventured to sum up the conclusions, to which the study of all these affairs has compelled me, and to state a general opinion as to the effect of music on character. It might have been more exciting to some readers, if I had started out with a hard and fast theory, and then discarded or warped everything contradictory to it, but it would have been a dishonest procedure for one who believes that musicians are neither saints of exaltation nor fiends of lawless ecstasy; but only ordinary clay ovens of fire and ashes like the rest of us. He who generalises is lost, and yet I make bold to believe that the conclusion of this book is true and reasonable and in accordance with such evidence as could be collected.

And now after this before-the-curtain lecture, it is high time, as Artemus would say, to "rise the curting."

CHAPTER II.

THE ANCIENTS

The very origins and traditions of the trade of music seem to enforce a certain versatility of emotion and experience. Apollo, the particular G.o.d of music, was not much of a lover, and what few affairs he had were hardly happy; his suit was either declined with thanks, or, if accepted, ended in the death of the lady; as for himself--being a G.o.d, he was denied the comfortable convenience of suicide. Daphne, as every one knows, took to a tree to escape his attentions; and Coronis, as so many another woman, was soon blase of divine courts.h.i.+p, and, for variety, turned her eyes elsewhere. She was punished with death indeed; but her son was Aesculapius. Which explains the medicinal value music has always claimed.

Old Boetius--who had affection enough for both a first and a second wife--tells, in his treatise on music, many anecdotes of the art's influence, not only upon sickness but upon wrathful mobs bent on mischief. He quotes Plato's statement that "the greatest caution is to be taken not to suffer any change in well-moraled music, there being no corruption of manners in a republic so great as that which follows a gradual declination from a prudent and modest music; for whatever corruptions are made in music, the minds of the hearers will immediately suffer the same, it being certain that there is no way to the affections more open than that of hearing."

The musician proverbially both plays upon and is a lyre. This instrument, as is well known, was first made out of a vacant turtle-sh.e.l.l, by Mercury, the G.o.d of gymnastic exercises and of theft, that is to say, of technic, and of plagiarism. Mercury was nimble with his affections also; among his progeny was the great G.o.d Pan, who is frequently reported, and commonly believed, to be dead. Pan was so far from beautiful that even his nurse could not find a compliment for him, and in fact dropped him and ran. Considering what one usually expects of a new-born infant, Pan must have been really unattractive. His lack of personal charm was the origin of the invention of Pan's pipes or syrinx.

Miss Syrinx of the Naiad family--one of the first families of Arcadia--was so horrified when Pan proposed to her, that she fled. He pursued and she begged aid of certain nymphs who lived in a houseboat on the river Ladon. When Pan thought to seize her, he found his arms filled with reeds. How many a lover has pursued thus ardently some charmer, only to find that when he has her, he has but a broken reed!

But Pan, noting that the wind was sighing musically about the reeds, cut seven of them with a knife and bound them together as a pastoral pipe. A wise fellow he, and could profit even from a jilt.

The eminent musician Arion, the inventor of glee clubs--a fact which should not be cherished against him--seems to have loved no one except himself, and therein to have had no rivals. The famous fish story to the effect that when he was compelled to leap into the sea, by certain mariners, he was carried to sh.o.r.e on the back of a dolphin, is only Jonah's adventure turned inside out.

Another early soloist was Orpheus, the beautiful love story of whose life is common property. He was torn to pieces by frantic women, a fate that seems always to threaten some of our prominent pianists and violinists at the hands of the matinee Bacchantes.

The patron saint of Christian music, Saint Cecilia, had a remarkable married life, including a platonic affair with an angel; which caused her pagan husband a certain amount of natural anxiety. Geoffrey Chaucer can tell you the legend of her martyrdom with the crystal charm of all his poesy.

The early Christian Church with its elaborate vocal wors.h.i.+p accomplished much for the cause of music, but also, with its vast encouragement to the monastic life and to celibacy, coerced a great number of musicians to be monks. This banishes them from a place here--not by any means because their being monks prevented their having love affairs, but because it greatly prevented a record of most of them--though happily not all. Abelard, for instance, was a monk, and his Heloise became a nun, and their love letters are among the most precious possessions in literature. Liszt, that Hungarian rhapsodist in amours, was he not also an abbe? There was a priest-musician, George de la Hele, who about 1585 gave up a lucrative benefice to marry a woman dowered with the name Madalena Guabaelaraoen. But most of them kept their benefices and their sweethearts both, though we find it noted as worthy of mention in the epitaph of the composer and canon, Pierre de la Rue, in the 16th century, that as an "adorateur diligent du Tres-Haut, ministre du Christ, il sut garder la chastete et se preserver du contact de l'amour sensuel." But because you see it in an epitaph, it is not always necessarily so.

Sir John Hawkins, in his delightsome though ponderous history of music, tells of the disastrous infatuation of Angelus Politia.n.u.s, who flourished in 1460 as a canon of the Church, and the teacher of the children of Lorenzo dei Medici.

"Ange Politien," he says, "a native of Florence, who pa.s.sed for the finest wit of his time in Italy, met with a fate which punished his criminal love. Being professor of eloquence at Florence, he unhappily became enamoured of one of his young scholars who was of an ill.u.s.trious family, but whom he could neither corrupt by his great presents, nor by the force of his eloquence. The vexation he conceived at this disappointment was so great as to throw him into a burning fever; and in the violence of the fit he made two couplets of a song upon the object with which he was transported. He had no sooner done this than he raised himself from his bed, took his lute, and accompanied it with his voice in an air so tender and affecting that he expired in singing the second couplet."

Which reminds one of the actor Artemus Ward describes as having played Hamlet in a Western theatre, where, there being no orchestra, he was compelled to furnish his own slow music and to play on a flute as he died.

CHAPTER III.

THE MEN OF FLANDERS

The Belgian historian, Van der Straeten, has illuminated the crowded shelves of his big work, "La Musique aux Pays-Bas avant Le XIXe Siecle,"

with various little instances of romance that occurred to the numberless minstrels and weavers of tangled counterpoint in the Netherlands of the old time. Some of these instances are simply hints, upon which the fervid imagination will spin imaginary love yarns in endless gossamer.

Thus of Marc Houtermann (1537--1577) "Prince of musicians" at Brussels.

All we know of his wife is from her epitaph. She died the same year he died--so we fancy it was of a broken heart she died; and she was only twenty-six at the time--so we can imagine how young and lithely beautiful she must have been. Her name, too, was Joanna Gavadia--a sweet name, surely never wasted on an ungraceful woman; and on her tombstone she is called "pudicissima et musicis scientissima." So she was good and she was skilful in music, like Bach's second wife; and doubtless, like her, of infinite help and delight to her husband.

Van der Straeten's book is cluttered up with doc.u.ments of musty interest. Among them are a number that gain a pathetic interest by the frequence of the appeals of musicians or their widows for a pittance of charity from the hand of some royal or ducal patron. If there be in these democratic days any musician who feels humiliated by the struggle for existence with its necessities for wire-pulling and log-rolling and sly advertis.e.m.e.nt, and by the difficulty of stemming the tide of public ignorance and indifference, let him remember that at least he is a free man, and need lick n.o.body's boots; and let him cast an eye upon the chronicles of shameful humiliation, childish deference, grovelling servility, and whimsical reward or punishment, favour, or neglect, that marked the "golden age" when musicians found patrons from whose conceit or ennui they might wheedle a most uncertain living.

Among the most pathetic of such instances is that of Josse Boutmy (1680--1779), court organist at Brussels, and famous in his day,--which was a long day. When he was at the age of eighty and the father of twelve children, he had to stoop to appeals for charity; again at ninety-seven he appeals. At ninety-eight he pleads to be retired with a pension; at ninety-nine he dies. Three days after his death his son is asking a pension for the mother of that dozen children. She also writes a pitiful letter still preserved.

"My husband, Judocus Boutmy, had the happiness of serving, for thirty-five years, as first organist of the chapel of Your Highness.